Transforming Work

Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry

Katherine C. Little

Publication Year: 2013

Pastoral poetry has long been considered a signature Renaissance mode: originating in late sixteenth-century England via a rediscovery of classical texts, it is concerned with self-fashioning and celebrating the court. But, as Katherine C. Little demonstrates in Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Medieval Poetry, the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor. Little offers a new literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first English pastorals used rural laborers familiar from medieval texts—plowmen and shepherds—to reflect on the social, economic, and religious disruptions of the sixteenth century. In medieval writing, these figures were particularly associated with the reform of the individual and the social world: their work also stood for the penance and good works required of Christians, the care of the flock required of priests, and the obligations of all people to work within their social class. By the sixteenth century, this reformism had taken on a dangerous set of associations—with radical Protestantism, peasants' revolts, and complaints about agrarian capitalism. Pastoral poetry rewrites and empties out this radical potential, making the countryside safe to write about again. Moving from William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the medieval shepherd plays, through the Piers Plowman–tradition, to Edmund Spenser’s pastorals, Little’s reconstructed literary genealogy discovers the “other” past of pastoral in the medieval and Reformation traditions of “writing rural labor.”

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The divide between the medieval and the early modern (or
Renaissance) periods is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in studies
of the pastoral mode, in which the literature of the Middle Ages is
often entirely absent. Either these studies begin with the sixteenthcentury
pastoral of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender or William...

Chapter One: Medieval Traditions of Writing Rural Labor

Medieval literature has played a minor role in the literary
history of the pastoral mode for an obvious reason: medieval English
writers neither imitated Virgil’s Eclogues nor seemed particularly interested
in writing about or in the guise of shepherds. This lack of enthusiasm
for shepherds does not mean, however, that they are entirely...

Chapter Two: The Invention of the English Eclogue

Interest in the eclogue form and its shepherds seems to
appear (or reappear) almost entirely out of nowhere in early sixteenthcentury
England. Although Virgil’s works were certainly known to
medieval authors, the Eclogues had very little influence on the development of vernacular literature in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century...

Chapter Three: The Pastoral Mode and Agrarian Capitalism

The emergence of the pastoral mode has long been understood
as a decisive moment in the history of literature but not, interestingly,
as a decisive moment in the history of shepherds.1 Yet the rediscovery
of Virgil’s Eclogues and the subsequent flourishing of literary
imitations, a process that began in the early sixteenth century and continued...

Chapter Four: Transforming Work

Thus far, this study has argued that the history of pastoral
belongs properly to a history of “writing rural labor.” Such a history
must take into account not only specific changes in how rural laborers
might be represented—the distinguishing characteristics of shepherds,
for example, which were discussed in chapters 2 and 3—but also shifts...

The previous chapters have explored the way in which
sixteenth-century pastoral emerged in relation to broader traditions of
writing rural labor: the ecclesiastical pastoral, the polemic of the enclosure
controversy, and the Piers Plowman tradition. Such a broad approach
may seem well-suited for the poetry discussed thus far—the...

Chapter Six: Reading Pastoral in Book 6 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

In book 6 of his Faerie Queene (1596) Spenser returns to
the pastoral mode, but this is a far more self-consciously courtly version
that seems to have little or nothing to do with the broader traditions
of writing rural labor that helped to shape the Calender. Indeed,
the defining feature of this pastoral episode is the life of ease, otium,...

Afterword

The Renaissance has long been understood as a beginning:
of the individual, of historical consciousness, of new literary forms. Although
medievalists have tried to modify this defining characteristic by
pushing these beginnings back to the Middle Ages, it still remains to be
seen whether the Renaissance can ever shake its associations with beginnings...

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